hanging in and sitting down

 

 This is a random picture of Morris Dancers from the Solano Stroll in 2019.

It's here because I usually like to have a picture that goes with a blog posting, but there's no way for me to illustrate what's on my mind at the moment because it's a thought. It's a judgement. It's a weighing in on something that bothers me and that something is a little abstract and a little layered and so here's a nice picture of people doing a fun thing on a sunny day to get me started on something that is not very much fun, though the day is sunny and full of smoke.

Today I got a link to another blog post from someone I've known online since around 2005, which is centuries in internet time. We have never met in real life. I don't expect that we ever will. I know her writing and have bought at least one of her books. She's a poet. So it was interesting to see that she'd written something that wasn't on FB, since she's been ill and moving and had generally a lot going on. It was a long post, but up near the beginning of it she dropped an acronym I didn't know. (There are so many acronyms I do not know.) There was a hyperlink, so I clicked it. It went straight to a LMGTFY. 

I was furious. Like I would have googled the damn thing on my own if the link hadn't been there. I stopped reading the piece and went back to work. After a while and after I'd googled the acronym, I went back and read the entire post.

It was very good. It was long and covered how we (meaning people we, not left we or right we) simplify things in politics. How we like easy answers to things that are anything but easy. It talked about Medea and how tragedy is always about characters that cannot change, that it's character, not destiny that dooms us. It was about her recent breakup and how that has no simple answers either and that to take the simple answer of calling her better off without the ex is no support. It ignores what the relationship was and who she is. It was really good and I was glad that I had read it.

I nearly didn't. I was that angry. Did it make sense to be that pissed off at something that may have just been a joke? At something that might have been her impatience at having to explain something for the umpteenth time to people too incurious to find it out for themselves. I have no way of knowing what she meant by it and really no way to ask. So I got over myself and read past my anger and found something that I will think about for a long while. It was because I had internet decades of trust built up and that trust paid off.

Sometimes we need to wait past our first reactions in this asynchronous, complicated conversation that is social media. It doesn't matter whether our reactions are driven by hurt, anger, or a sense of justice. Sometimes it's better to sit for a bit, find something else to do. It's better to sit with ourselves, with our feelings and ask what I want from that next thing I type. Who am I talking to? Why is my voice necessary? Is it necessary now? 

The answer might be that I need to respond and that my voice is necessary. But it's rare that it's necessary right now and at this moment. You can always take a moment.

nothing beneath you but air

One disadvantage to having a computer/internet/communications sort of job (which is pretty much like a lot of people) is that if there's a storm on the tubes, there's pretty much no way to avoid it. So with everyone else, I've been deluged by this Rush Limbaugh mess. I think it's interesting that as much bile and hate that Rush has spilled over the years, it was this particular bolus of hatefulness that's captured our fleeting attention and imagination. It's probably timing, what with the Komen debacle earlier this year, the Santorum ascendance (and the dubious pleasure of hearing his beyond retro attitudes about women and sexuality), and the tone-deaf (but highly dog-whistlely)  "No Girls Allowed" panel in the House.  I guess the only sort of surprise I've had is how stupid or disingenuous mainstream media has been about it. (I was not surprised that Bill Maher thought liberals should back off, since Rush faux-pologized.)

But this whole sad, predictable mess has been only a small distraction from something that's been bothering me for a few days. Last weekend I finished reading Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. It's about a group of slum dwellers living on some undeveloped land near the international airport in Mumbai. Reading it, you see what a fairy tale Slumdog Millionaire was.

Not that I've got anything against fairy tales, now.

But the reality of the lives that Boo writes about is that very few escape and that escape may mean capitulation to the corruption that permeates the institutions that the slum dwellers interact with. There's no good way out and usually there's no way out at all. It's hard to put my finger on what is staying uneasily with me ever since I finished the book. Partly it's knowing/suspecting that the only people who could do anything about these people's lives won't. (The impact of charity - precisely nothing - is made extremely clear).

Still the thing that nags, the thing that is about life here where I can do things, is how vulnerable these lives are. People die of jaundice. People die because cuts get infected from the sewage lakes they walk in. People die from desperation and eating rat poison. People die because they get hit by a car and people walk past them all day long until they finally die. People die because they get beaten to death, either by security cops or drug dealers. (Nobody knows and nobody but their friends care. The cops will call it something else on the death certificate and that will be that.) Now people die here in the USA all the time too. People die from preventable diseases and kill themselves out of of despair. Homeless people die unattended on the street and people get beat up by the cops. But people don't die here because they've gone to a hospital and the doctor will only give the medicine if they pay her (like right now) for it. They don't die because the medicine's no good at the hospital or because if they don't get taken care of by someone, usually a relative, there's absolutely no one else.

We are so safe.

It's not that horrible things don't happen, that there's no abuse of power, no poor people, no violent cops, but in the main? USians, even the poorest, expect some variety of justice, rely of some sort of medical help, even if that means the emergency room, and most don't worry that they'll starve to death, despite high levels of food insecurity among the poor. People expect to go to school. If they end up in court, they don't have to listen to a judge translate their complex testimony into monosyllables for the court stenographer. They can get a lawyer for free. There are institutions that often work, but maybe more important, we expect them to work. And we get pretty upset and make noise when they don't.

Maybe the thing that bothers me most about libertarians (or at least the ones I see roaming in packs on the internet) is that they want to take this away. They have fooled themselves into thinking that if we got rid of government, which would mean getting rid of these flawed, vital institutions, we'd be in the New Jerusalem.  We wouldn't. We'd be in slums made out of decaying wood, glass, stone, and steel, rather than ones out of cardboard and crumbling hand-made bricks.  There would be a few people living behind compound walls protected by those security guards, guards who will kick the poor to death and leave their bodies in the manicured lawns outside the walls for someone else to clean up. This is what makes me crazy about the politicians that pander to these poisonous fantasies. It's not just the lie, it's the vision of a feudal world with cell phones, where the rich are so very rich and everyone else struggles just to keep from falling.